WordPress Plugin to Whisper Comments to the Blog Administrator

Lord Chaos’s Whisper WordPress Plugin is something new and interesting for full version WordPress users. It allows readers to comment privately on a public WordPress blog, directing their comments directly to the blog administrator or specific logged in member.

According to the feature list, private comments would be seen by the “intended user” and Admin, hidden from everyone else. It’s customizable with a variety of options.

So who would use the Whisper WordPress Plugin? After all, part of the fun of blogging is the open comment policy, right?

If you are running a private blog, members only, or intranet blog within its own network of users, then I see this WordPress Plugin might be of value. And there are times when I’d like someone to “whisper” privately to me that I’ve misspelled a word or messed up instead of having the comment hanging out there for all to see my “oops!”. But that’s just life. Mistakes happen. Get over it and on with it.

Have you tried this Whisper WordPress Plugin? Do you see a need for it with your blog?

4 Comments

People willing to signal mistakes or inaccuracies might not want their comments to appear, if they do not want to pass as the Mr-knows-it-all.

Or people who might have a comment or a question which they are not sure is not silly — like ‘Sorry Lorelle, but what do you mean exactly by “Admin”, is it someone in particular, or did I miss something ?’

On the whole, I would use this kind of functionality for all the occasions I remember from school or conferences, when I’d really want to ask something from or say something to the teacher or speaker, but I’d rather not everyone else hear.

Still, the author’s (scrambled) e-mail address in the contact page serves just this purpose.

Or (if new commenters are all moderated), I can post a comment with a strange name (like ‘Mrs-knows-it-all’ or ‘MrFeelsSilly’) so that it remains stuck in the moderation queue, for the author’s eyes only.

I think “whisper” is a good idea, because occassionally you want to send the author a note that you don’t want everyone else seeing. By having that ability on the comments page, it eliminates the need to find a contact form, and the author knows that what the commenter says is related to a specific post.

I’m working on a new site, and this seems like something that I wanted, but didn’t know it yet. I look forward to seeing how this can be integrated into sites.

Instead of using this, I’ve had a “comment publicly” and “comment privately” link at the bottom of each post. The public one is a normal comment. The private one is just a link to an email form that comes to me.